I'm delighted with the stand they are taking. I was previously with Eircom and was one of the thousands who left when they caved into IMRO. While I woldn't case myself as purer than pure, I do frequently download iso's for various Linux distributions.

As an aside, I've found UPC to be a much superior ISP, with great customer service, not like the bad old days of NTL.

Posted
by
samzenpuson Tuesday August 24, 2010 @12:48PM
from the making-the-grade dept.

A pair of enterprising Swedish schoolgirls ended up in court after they were caught bugging their teachers break room. The duo hoped they would hear discussions about upcoming tests and school work, allowing them to get better grades. It worked until one of them decided to brag about it on Facebook, and the authorities were called in. The girls were charged with trespassing and fined 2,000 kronor ($270) each in Stockholm District Court.

Posted
by
kdawsonon Monday June 14, 2010 @10:56PM
from the it-takes-braaains dept.

danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."

Posted
by
samzenpuson Tuesday June 01, 2010 @11:53AM
from the everyone-needs-a-hobby dept.

jerryjamesstone writes "Everybody is into rail these days; it is the greenest way to get around next to a bike. Leonid Mulyanchik has been into it for years since before the Berlin Wall fell, since before the first Macintosh, building his own private underground Metro railway system. English-Russia says that he has been doing it with his pension, that it is all legal and approved and that he is still at it. Gizmodo calls it 'Partly the traditional, inspiring, one man against all odds type of persistence, but more the obsessive, borderline insane persistence.'"Update: 06/02 07:33 GMT by T: And if you're the type to visit Burning Man, you can actually ride a home-made monorail this summer, too.

Posted
by
samzenpuson Tuesday June 01, 2010 @09:40AM
from the they-forgot-the-ponies dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The new Hungarian government chose to replace the home pages with a 'disclaimer' page on several governmental websites such as ministries or the Foreign Office. The title and the main message is 'OMG,' which is followed by an explanation that the inherited websites 'lack any kind of uniform structure' and this is 'unworthy of Hungary.' Today is the takeover day in most ministries for the new administration."

It's within my "rights" to call you a simpering faggot with a Napolean complex, but that doesn't necessarily make doing so the right (and/or moral) thing to do.

Maybe you should quit jerking off over these purely semantic notions you seem to have acquired, pull your head out of your ass, take a good long look around you, and form a spontaneous conclusion or two, based not upon "given Deeply Held Value x and stimulus of situation y ergo z", but rather "situation y is bullshit, pure and simple, ergo it is wrong, and if Deeply Held Value x contradicts this basic notion, then Deeply Held Value x must itself be less than fully correct, full-stop, end of sentence, end of chapter".

If you RTFA (and not even the paper is necessary for this), you will see that they are limited by the fidelity of their setup, ie. signal to noise. Hence, when they improve their apparatus, they will get more accurate results.

The cynic in me thinks it will go this way: They make this announcement today. For the next few months, they do absolutely nothing. Then, they fabricate a bunch of data, and announce that they've determined that 99% of all P2P traffic is protected by copyright. Authorities cowtow, and those "three-strikes" laws get put in place (and enforced) everywhere.

It doesn't matter that the data was faked...they expressly stated that it would all be anonymised and not linked to any specific customer...so how can anyone prove it's been faked?

The article speaks for itself. Irelands oldest and largest ISP will be blocking access to the pirate bay from September 1st while other ISPs have rejected the request to block TPB

From the Irish Times:

Under an out-of-court agreement with EMI Records, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warners in January, Eircom agreed to cut off customers found to be repeatedly downloading music illegally. The deal also required Eircom to cut off access to Pirate Bay if requested.

Yesterday, cable TV operator UPC, which has more than 120,000 broadband subscribers, announced it would not comply with a request to block access to Pirate Bay."Link to Original Source